July’s a high-pressure month for Steve Ballmer, so he’s not at home to Mr Cock-up.
First, he has to stand before thousands of Microsoft partners at his company’s annual partner conference - next week - and convince them to believe in the roadmap and evangelize them into selling more of Microsoft’s products and services.
Then, …

COMMENTS

I wonder if he will,,,,,,,

I wonder if he will scream and yell and howl and run around on all fours and act like a crazed baboon the way he normally does.

I know he thinks that people really appreciate his special brand of enthusiasm and I am sure that it will really make a good impression when partners and inverters are no doubt dubious and concerned about the direction and reputation of Microsoft at this particular time when it's credibility is going down the drain and the fact that they just informed everyone who did show faith in them and purchased a "Kin" that they are abandoned on a whim and out of luck.

Why is it important?

"Just isn't right"?

Computing history is littered with version numbers that don't always follow (DB2, what happened to DB1?), Server 2008 is either 6.0 or 6.1 depending on the service pack, indicating that Windows 7 is just another name for Vista SP3, MS obviously renamed it Seven so that stupid people think Vista isn't Seven.

Win 95 and NT had similar version numbers (both 4.0.x) but they are completely different animals, Me was 4.9 and 2K was 5.0 and I don't think that 0.1 difference makes a dogs breakfast any good (although that's the impression that MS managed to give the Vista hell/Seven heaven crowd).

And of course, although 6.1 makes total sense (as Vista is 6), the *real* reason that MS couldn't rename it Seven internally is that they had a complete, ground up rewrite project that was Seven (7.0.x) but it didn't get much past a basic modular kernel, very limited HAL and some very basic service scheduling ended up sidelined as MinWin, sidelined because of the whole Vista debacle.

The Sainted Charlotte

what are you on about...keep up the MS banging

did you even read that "leek" regarding Windows 8, your talking horse sh**, any product ever made has had a brain storming of some kind listing features it must have features competitors have, things they need to fix or improve. its nothing to do with Envy, its simple planing, and the leek wasnt from MS.

And again, whats th big deal with them planing windows 8 whilst windows 7 is just out of the door, i stress the word planing because that is all it is, its a bunch of folk sitting around a table talking about it, nothing is actual being made yet according to those leeked documents and even if it were being made where is the harm in it?

really you guys need to stop this negative press towards MS, if its justified then fine but everything is negative and rarely balanced, frankly im getting tired of it

@AC

***TL;DR version available at the bottom of comment.***

Sir, I doth protest.

El Reg is being remarkably restrained in documenting Microsoft's fade to black. The comparisons they make are entirely justified. You are watching for real, today, Microsoft taking their cue from the likes of DEC, IBM and SUN. It’s over in all but name; another decade and they will be fodder for much bigger and more innovative companies. The Sun to some future Oracle.

Listen, I am a Microsoft and Red Hat sysadmin. I rely on the stuff to get my job done, and I use it pretty extensively at home. They have to pretty good products, and a lot of quite okay products. They also have a huge festering pile of real stinkers and a corporate culture of exceptional arrogance. To put it quite bluntly they simply aren’t listening to the people who traditionally are buying their products.

There are millions of companies, individuals and even entire governments spending BILLIONS of dollars worldwide on projects whose sole purpose is nothing greater than reducing or eliminating “the Microsoft overhead.” In Millions more companies worldwide, Microsoft is treated as legacy software; they have moved to other platforms, and started down the long road to “not Microsoft.”

Listen: it will take a decade, maybe more…but the game is over. In order to simply survive the next ten years the company would need a change of corporate culture they are pathologically unable to commit to. As arrogant as I claim Microsoft to be, and in full knowledge of how arrogant this statement is to make, I swear to you on everything I believe in that I could do a better job with that company than their entire extant board of directors.

The condensed version of the solution to the company’s woes is:

1) Fire a very large % of their senior management and replace them with individuals who are significantly more open-minded. These folks need to be listening to voices both from within the company and from without and searching constantly for new, good ideas. They should most emphatically /not/ simply be copying other business models once another megacorp has established themselves in the market.

2) They need to have an internal group that vets any non-Skunkworks business plan for viability. If there’s no business case to be made, it needs to be murdered. These analyses need to recur for each project on a regular basis, and recommendations from the business group need to be taken seriously. You can’t be everything to everyone, and sometimes you just get to market too late to make a dent.

3) Microsoft also needs a corporate communications specialist. There are a lot of warring fiefdoms and Microsoft and this absolutely /must/ be put to bed. One strong corporate vision, and (almost) everyone plays along. The almost is because you always need a Skunkworks or three.

4) Skunkworks. Microsoft needs a few. Microsoft in fact has a few right now, (Microsoft research,) but I feel these need to be given more funding and greater room to run amok. Perhaps 90% of what they create never makes it to the product stage, but they will generate a lot of experience that can be incorporated into future products later on. More importantly, they crank out an absolutely gigantic patent portfolio. This is a deadly serious requirement in modern Big Tech.

5) Simplification. Part of the reason Microsoft is earning so much resentment is that their offerings are so complex. The claim is that this is to hep their customers, but the reality is that it leads to confusion and irritation. The solution is not a massive continual diversification of products, but to incorporate new features into existing products. It makes people feel they are getting real value from upgrading, reduces the per-company licensing burden and will help grow some of that rapidly dwindling market share.

6) Licensing. The total amount of money that a given business has to spend on licensing won’t change just because Microsoft decided that what was once one product is now two. (With separate licensing and CALs, etc.) They are bleeding everyone dry and this is leading to those aforementioned “abandon Microsoft before they kill us” projects. When your entire product line starts to be treated as legacy for no reason other than cost overruns, then you are taxing your customers too hard.

7) Standards. Like it or not, data portability has become a huge concern. Microsoft can’t play the proprietary standards game for much longer. Working hard towards actual open standards while ramping up the Skunkworks so they can compete on features while keeping margins high is the only hope. If they fail to make more than token gestures towards open standards they will not only be viewed as legacy, but very soon here as hostile.

If you read through these points, I think you’ll find that all seven of them are completely against the corporate culture of most of the management types working at Microsoft. Yet, if they aren’t each and every one of them addressed, Microsoft will continue to bleed market share and eventually fade away.

As such, I feel the “negativity” is entirely justified. Microsoft has reached a crisis point, (in fact I could argue that crisis point was around 2007,) and they have responded poorly. I would go so far as to call everything they have attempted in the past five years ****ed near an abject failure.

Windows Server 2008 R2 is an exception; it was more than a minor upgrade to it’s predecessor, it was truly a fantastic operating system in it’s own right, and worth every single penny you could pay for it. Windows 7 on the other hand was nothing more than what Vista should have been. It was too late, and it did nothing more than catch Microsoft up to the state of the art at the time of release. It didn’t innovate past their competition or buy them any time. In fact their competition is largely out in front one more time, innovating on smaller platforms with far greater battery life and ease of use.

Almost everything else that got release with this wave of products is the same story. Exchange 2010 was okay, but only because I turned the turd that was Exchange 2007 into something that was marginally acceptable. Office 2010 similarly was nothing more than polishing the turd of Office 2007. LCS 2007R2 and SQL 2008 R2 stand out as being some of the only winners of the “extended family.”

Silverlight is taking too long, and WinMo is too little, to late. The platform is utterly dead and it hasn’t even hit the streets. The impossible to comprehend “elevnteen squillion versions that are sort of the same but not” is a familiar song that is flat out not going to cut it in the very consumer-centric mobile and embedded spaces.

***TL;DR version of this comment:***

Microsoft suffers from a chronic FAILURE TO EXECUTE. This is in turn a failure of management. The management who control the finances, vision and direction of the company. That direction is to all indications “straight into the ground.”

Please do not get me confused for an anti-Microsoft hater, an Apple fanboy, Googletard or other such one dimensional individual. As I said way at the top, I use Microsoft products every day, right alongside my Red Hat. I want Microsoft to succeed more than most, because I consider them one of the only viable checks and balances against an increasingly terrifying Google and a sociopathic Apple.

It isn’t going to happen however; the extant management of Microsoft isn’t capable of making the required changes, or actually listening to their paying customers.

whats th big deal with them planing windows 8

I'm not sure about "Millions"

"Microsoft is treated as legacy software; they have moved to other platforms, and started down the long road to “not Microsoft.”"

I don't know if it's millions of companies, but one of our services is about to move an application off Windows to Unix, meaning we can de-commission about 140 Wintel machines. The 12 Unix machines the app is moving to have been in place for ~5 years running another app. They'll still be running that app in addition to the migrated one in around two months time.

Should free up some data centre space.

That said, Win 2008 is starting to be deployed elsewhere in the company, so it's not like we're dumping MS just yet.

All that's really happening is that Windows is becoming just another choice when picking a platform instead of the default choice that it was in the last 15 years or so.

I Feel a Need to Do Some 'splaining 'bout My 'plaining 'bout their "Planing"

Yes, they have every right to do all the planing they wish. And if their planes are based mainly on copying Apple's ideas, good for them. Stealing other people's ideas and selling them for less is what MS has always done. Unfortunately for them they've gotten pretty bad at it lately. They tend to be a year late and a dozen security patches short. The Kin is probably an example of this. By the time the MS machine got the idea out the door they realized they'd already missed the boat.

@Trevor_Pott

The formula you suggest is pretty close to the Sun formula (which can work, but not sustained, and lets face it, in the end it failed), and while it's idealistic and "worthy", people simily are not leaving microsoft in droves, and while you claim "Please do not get me confused for an anti-Microsoft hater" (did you mean anti-hater?), you still want them to change their management structure and business model, all you're saying is "I don't hate you, just everything about you", you are just like every other MS hater, you just took longer saying it.

@No, I will not fix your computer

I think you have me wrong. I don't want to fundamentally change Microsoft's business model. I want to change their spending priorities such that they are actually generating enough innovation to keep their heads above the water. The game has changed around them, and they need to keep up.

Fundamentally, the idea of making good software and charging through the nose for it is not a bad business plan. What they need to do however is adapt to changing consumer expectations. Simplicity in licensing models is one example. Innovation and leadership in a few key categories is another critical one.

They also need to keep up with the patent cold war that has broken out. Frankly Apple is absolutely wasting them on this. Not only are they stepping up their number of patents, but the number of relevant (and sadly of overbroad) patents is huge. This is a direct business threat and needs to be met head on.

The problem is that the existing management are incapable of adapting. They have demonstrated this and thus they need to go. Most of the people at Microsoft are fine; the technology is fine, even many of the basic business approaches are fine. The issue is the speed with which the company can recognise and adapt to changing market conditions. It has become too slow and to internally confused to be useful.

The worst possible thing that can happen to a large company is that it breaks into warring fiefdoms that ultimately work against eachother instead of for the common good of the company. Microsoft is a company experiencing exactly this. They need strong leadership to bring the troops in line, and this leadership needs to be capable of making the subtle changes to both spending and product design required to keep Microsoft relevant and at the forefront of IT.

Pedant Alert: Mr Cock-up

What's with this use of the word "Partner"

You should be careful with this word. I know Microsoft PR has been deliberately diluting it, in recent years, but a "Partner" remains a senior Microsoft executive - a high-60s or 70+ player - typically, one who gets a seat at the likes of the SPSA money trough.

In short, Partners are people like Terry Myerson and Andrew Lees - the Tweedledumb and Tweedledee that piloted the good ship KIN onto the rocks. There is no "Danger" of these Partners ever needing reassurance over Microsoft's direction, because they are the ones at the helm.

Partners

Re: what are you on about...keep up the MS banging

OK, ignoring the grammar and spelling, when a new OS is in the planning stage it is often well before the launch of the latest version (apart from that large gap between XP ans Vista, but there is a good example of what happens when you don't practice!). Any 'leak', so long as it being authentic, will be quite well into the development process by now and reletively accurate, admittedly though, some features may be dropped and some added. That is why leaks are leaks. Otherwise they would be a Microsoft released feature list.

@ tony 33

@ Stupid version numbers

Please don't make us explain this again :( Lots of software (NON Microsoft and Microsoft) looks at the version number and fails to install if it doesn't like what it sees. Keeping the version number the same makes that software install and work which it will as Vista/7 are just that..the same. This saves thousands of apps having to be changed/updated to deal with the new version of Windows. Windows 7 is a fixed Vista so MS didn't want companies to have to go through insane testing cycles again. DO YOU GET IT.

"Your cock up ... my arse" Ben Elton's greatest line, Thin Blue Line.

"looks at the version number and fails to install if it doesn't like what it sees ... This saves thousands of apps having to be changed/updated to deal with the new version of Windows."

If your theory is correct it's the installers that have to updated/changed and not the apps.

As someone whose job it was to build installers for commercial Windows software -- and deal with and manage DLL hell -- at no point did I or anyone I worked with ever build an installer that works the way you describe. Checking the leading version number digit, and thus minor revisions not counting, my arse -- that simply not how installer scripts work.

Being a professional I always knew that future versions of Windows were coming, and that they would likely be backwards compatible whereas old versions might not run software.

Therefore the model used was exclusion rather than inclusion, i.e. software install on any version of Windows except legacy ones that you know it will not work on.

You do not create installers that work on inclusion principle, i.e. only install on specific Windows versions that you know work on, because Service Packs might come along or indeed an inevitable new Windows and all your installers are broken.

Proof this is correct? Get an installer from pre-Vista days (when Windows NT version was less than 6) and does it still install? Yes it does. Would it still install if it was NT 7? Yes it would.

You write Installers?

I have seen more than one installer claim Vista was Windows 98 ... LOL. You might know what you're doing, but most Windows developers do not, I guess that is why they write code for Microsoft OS's. So the question is, since you seem to have at least gotten that right, why do you still write for that "entreprise" OS?

The other day, three ppl were downloading a 20Gb VM from a Windows XP system. Despite the fact that the ubuntu and Mac started downloading like 10 minutes after Windows XP started downloading, both Ubunutu and Mac OS were about an hour faster than XP. XP originally reported it would need 2.5 hours, LOL ... I do not know precisely how long it took, though ... because I was not even really monitoring the download!!!!! ... but the Mac guy and me (Ubuntu) were finished testing the VM when the XP guy still had 30 minutes to wait for the download ... ;-). I know Windows Vista and 7 are slower than XP at downloading from the LAN so that should sort of tell you what to upgrade to, right? .... Because, when you do nfs, smb is not even in the same league, let alone on MS OS's.

Kicking a man when he's down ...... woe upon woe.

"Balmer does not understand technology. Gates, evil as he was and is, at least understood technology, having once been a programmer. Balmer was, and is, a salesman. Though how he sold anything is beyond me, if he ever did." .... Eadon Posted Wednesday 7th July 2010 23:43 GMT

Eadon,

That is most probably true and the root cause of Microsoft's present woes but nowadays, in order to succeed fantastically in global applications and corporations, one not only needs to understand technology but also how to apply it to leverage sustainable market advantage which will have populations following your leads ...... and that may also be a case of them having to purchase your products, although that would be as a secondary bonus to the prime directive which would Capture and Command of Cloud Controls, for from there can you remotely access all Virulent Markets and Vital Operating System, which would seem to be what Azure are failing so well at.

The simple answer, of course, to immediately reverse the decline in fortunes, is to bring in someone who knows exactly how things should be working and who would be able to share it with top management, for them to reinvent the company in a phorm more appropriate to future needs, which in an ideal world, would also be their feeds. Such folk though, able to pull off that simply complex trick, are as rare as hens' teeth, but they are out there, ...... patiently sowing prime seeds that spectacularly grow. :-)

Hmm

Well, i dont mean to inflame this any more because largely i agree with what some folk have said on here, some of the software that MS are running with is either a, a rehash of an older product (which to be honest isnt bad at all, just not a leap forward) or is simply bad. Are MS going to flame out? maybe but i doubt very much that will be to Linux and Apple need their heads screwed on to realise that Jobs is not God.

But firstly i believe that leak in question was from not that long ago, acording to the time frame its still in the planning stages, ie before development.

Secondly we "bash" Microsoft a lot but i do think that things are not quite so bad as people think.

Im not going to go through all the reasons for and against because we all know them and we all ignore the ones we dont agree with.

But, i can take a Windows 7 disk, install it on five PCs in either 64 or 32bit, it will install almost all of the hardware, and the parts its doesnt usually can be found and installed with a simple driver update either from Windows Update or the manufactures website, PC complete.

Now on those same computers with the very latest public release of a Linux distro, it will install as windows had on one computer, with only minor updates needed. Two PCs required serious amount of work downloading and reading forums to get working fully, the final two PCs wouldnt install at all, pop the disk in, starts loading the installer and nothing, just sits there, ive messed with ACPI and every other option available in the BIOS one at a time and nothing.

My point is, Linux should be better than that, they will never hit mainstream if that continues. MS for all their bad points generally speaking does a good job at working on a huge number of hardware components, its not perfect but its a damn site better then Linux, I think what im trying to say here is that Linux has hardware issues, OSx is built around hardware and is thus very good and windows runs on just about every piece of crap out there but doesnt run great on any of them, which is better is up to the end user i guess, but perhaps instead of "bashing" MS we should have a bit more of an open mind on what the public expect.

maybe

maybe you are lucky, more likely is that the systems you installed it on were factory built? from my experience of countless computer built, systems built by the end user have had more issues with Linux than not. Which figures, much like the way apple uses pre set hardware linux can target pre spec'ed computers to get it right first time.

Frankly i dont care if people dont believe me, i have two PCs sitting right in front of me that will simply refuse to even install Linux, several distros have been tried. two that will work with any distro with a bit of work and one that works flawlessly

@chemist

Yeah the live CDs have the same issue, its actually a real pain in the arse, ive always said id love to run linux as a main system but i cant, and the tech support you recieve from forums is shocking, the expectation is that all users of Linux have a large and in depth knowledge of the system, if you dont you rarely get the time of day.

I have nothing against Linux as an OS, but when trying to get support on issues such as mine and all the advice may or may not be relievent to that distro it becomes a joke, i try every six months or so and to one extent on another on those two systems it does not work and in all my years ive never had an issue such as that with windows except to install the odd SCSI or SATA driver apon install. Windows is far from perfect but it isnt bad, in my mind, when compared to alternatives.

@ Darren Tuffs

Sorry you're having so much trouble - I can't imagine what the problem is. I've been using Linux more or less since the start and I've never had this behaviour. There may have been problems with X or the odd bit of hardware but never failure to install and boot a working system.

I assume the systems will boot a Windows installation disk. Does the system do nothing with a LiveCD or do you get an messages ?

Sorry for the delay

Aye, we shall take my home system as the example as ive had access to it for the longest.

This is what happens, pop the disk in, boot to optical drive, starts to load, on this latest Ubuntu it then brings up a screen not unlike the WIndows loading screen, with the wee graphic moving along, and thats it, it wont go any further it just continues to move. Other variations on that same computer with different distros or versions include, not booting or showing anything at all, serious graphic display issues, way way back i actually managed to get to the installer, where is crashed apon reboot with no errors, just a blank screen, my initial theory was graphics related, an older ATI card i was using 9800XT, had dual monitors, i forget the error message but once it said something was related to X and dual display, but apon disabling it the crash was terminal without error.

I can install it on a VM, in fact i have tried many, of course this has some serious downsides, most notabely having to use an OS within an OS makes little sence if your trying to use Linux as the main OS.

Now here is the odd bit, with the exception on my HDDs on this latest attempt the system is completely new, Moby, CPU, Graphics, which leads me to suspect its in some odd way HDD related, i would say that perhaps its my combination of BIOS settings thats screwing it up, but default settings produce no difference.

Windows installes fine, can do it locally or remote, no issues with HDDs.

That's what I've been told by more than on software house. Why don't you explain the 'real' reason why they wouldn't simply increment the version number? WHY would they claim it's for compatability if that's not the case they could simply say Windows 7 and make the build number fit.

Disconnect between Marketing and Developers, natch

Yeah yeah yeah, that's what Microsoft PR said was the "real reason"; and many people bought into it, and repeat it, but it's absolute rubbish. Were you talking to the people who built installers in these "software houses"?

Having worked in many organisation from start-ups through to global mega-corps over the years I can tell you what was more likely...

Windows Vista (NT6.0) finished and released, programmers start working on major update, not a new version -- using Microsoft's version.major.minor.build nomenclature -- so its NT6.1 in the source-tree, and at this point in time the Marketing bods do not have a name for the operating system that follows Vista.

Development of NT6.1 continues for months, source tree gets larger and more complex, whilst Marketing guys come up with name.

Eventually Marketing come up with "Windows 7" to show that it's 'new' and improved and another generation ... and not Vista. At this point Marketing bods probably don't even know about the build number, in fact I'd bet that was the case.

Software goes out to beta test and techie community laughs at Microsoft for calling NT6.1 'Windows 7'; so Marketing guys go to development team and say "Change the build number of the software", technie boys say "Not at this stage mate, if you want your software delivered on time". Oh... says Marketing bods.

Thus the designed to sound plausible excuse why 'Windows 7' is labeled NT6.1 was brainstormed, and then spouted.

This is what makes me sick of Windows

You go out and get that new Windows system to update from your current one great your all set and updated. Well bang a few years more money to upgrade yet again get the picture just one big bloody ripoff.

I currently run Vista SP 2 Business no problems but I was going to update to Windows 7 now there will be 8 so why don't Windows just do what Linux does with their updates, why charge etc.

Windows model is a dinosaur it worked 20 years when really it was the only game in town but now Linux is becoming a more viable and affordable option for consumers.

Re: This is what makes me sick of Windows

Houston, we have a problem. Microsoft has pretty much saturated their market( desktop ) and others have boxed them out of new markets along with their own failures there. So how does Microsoft keep the billions of $ coming in to keep the house of cards up? Doing annual updates is not going to get people to send $$ Microsoft's way, they need to sell the idea of big changes.

They have always been "greedy bastards" and the ways they've used to keep the $$ coming in and keep others out of the desktop market is legendary. Lucky for Microsoft, many many unqualified management types keep dictating the use of Microsoft products and keep building their budgetary clout within businesses. You know, the bigger your budget, the more impotent your are.

beer because they have to be delusional to keep spending corporate profits at the rates they have been when cheaper solutions surround them.